Charlie Sheen takes on Phil Robertson by dropping down to basement talk and slinging ‘you’re a dumb redneck idiot’ talk on Twitter. Really! Charlie Sheen the poster boy for stupidity calling anyone else stupid and being taken seriously?

We are seeing 1 Cor 1: 27, “for God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise….’ come to life right before our eyes.

My take on that principle is exactly what we are seeing. The ‘wise’ in their own eyes will not accept true wisdom, but rather rant and rail based on their mind games they set up to help them feel ok in spite of overwhelming evidence they are really headed downhill on a runaway humanistic created theology headed for a cliff.

The evidence is everywhere. Today’s paper has an editorial from the editor of the editorial page about how the current pope doesn’t care about politics and closes with let religion stay where it belongs, ‘in church on Sunday.’

Well my Bible says just the opposite. My religion belongs on the street everyplace I go. It is part and parcel to WHO I am. It cannot be removed from daily life.

Phil is getting hammered for quite simply believing this very concept. Live according to Biblical principles because you truly believe them. He called sin a sin. This is simple yet profound, and not something the world wants to hear. Charlie Sheen says this is unforgivable. Really. It is just the opposite. This is the core of true love! It is calling white black and believing you just redefined colors.

Jesus came and said, “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

He provided me a way to solve my main problem, living under the power of sin in my life. Sin that creates failure at all levels of life and even leading to death. Failure in every relationship, in every enterprise, and in basic functioning in a joyful satisfied way.

Jesus’ solution is not available until I understand sin and call it what it is; wrong, and my fault.

Once I get the great Ah Ha, sin is my problem and the source of all my problems; I now have a resolution to all these problems. Repentance!

But until the Ah Ha I was lost, foolish, darkened in understanding. I was smart, got good grades, lived a moderately successful life, but was inwardly miserable. I was doomed to ultimate failure over and over and over again. But unaware of my pitiful stupidity.

So is the way of the world.

Railing at something as simple as – here is a list of things God says are wrong. I love you and have a way for you to solve your issue. But I am God, not you. And you must solve your problem that you created, my way. Through Jesus’ payment of the penalty for doing wrong things. You must turn your desire to be a god over to the one true God. Accept the payment and you will be changed to a new creation, with a new life and eternal safety.

So the world rails at Phil.

It will rail at me.

It will rail at you.

But in taking our ‘religion’ and turning it into our witness of God’s love to us then taking it to the streets, we begin to change the world we come into contact with.

The world can argue theology, religion, church, and the right wing. But it can’t argue about the greatest message of all time, the changed life Jesus gave me and you.

We will be a force for change as we prepare the way of the Lord for His return. We will be a force for good and transformation of lives. We will be an occupation force on all streets, every place we go.

But we will also be railed against by those who don’t like the sound of ‘you are doing something God says is wrong.’

This book is not a “leadership-lite” book filled with cute and truthful antidotes, but a book with hard science communicated in an interesting way. Dr. John J. Medina is a developmental molecular biologist.

Presenting science in an interesting and useful way isn’t easy and Dr Medina succeeds sometimes and fails sometimes. But overwhelmingly, if you push through there are nuggets of gold to be found in this book.

Six of useful things I learned that can be productively applied:

1) If I make a presentation to a group for over 10 minutes and don’t do something to re-engage their interest, I am wasting the rest of my presentation. (Interesting application, for pastors, teachers, consultants or anyone trying to pass on knowledge.)

2) If I don’t exercise, I am basically killing my brain one cell at a time. But it takes very little effort (as little as thirty minutes of aerobic exercise, three times a week) to have a major positive improvement on brain function, including reducing the effects of some age related disease.

3) Multi-tasking is a myth and I lose significant productivity if I allow myself to be interupted. In fact, if I multi-task in the car on my cell phone, I have about the same safety factor as a drunk driver.

Did you know that 95% of Small and Mid sized Companies fail to reach their goals?

This is an amazing statistic but fortunately you don’t need to be stuck without hope in your Organization!

C- LEVEL Services uses a proprietary process to help its clients overcome the obstacles to achieving their goals.

This process requires leaders to change how they think and requires implementation of Three Pieces usually missing – Optimization, Strategy and Innovation.

Optimization sets in place a continuous improvement process that documents and fine tunes processes and discovers leverage points in the organization that produces maximum results. It also produces inspired performance based on basic principles of motivation and management.

Strategy takes control of your future and defines the goals and objectives of the organization, the barriers to reaching these goals and objectives and creates strategies and action plans to achieve them. To be effective these objectives and action plans need to be defined at the department and individual levels and compensation plans developed based on these goals and objectives. All of a sudden the strategic plan becomes an operating document and the whole organization begins working together in UNITY! This creates amazing results!

Finally, Innovation helps change the future. Peter Drucker said, “If you are not putting yourself out of business with new products and services, your competition will.” Most disruptive new ideas come when a specific process is used for innovation.

So if you want to reach your goals, reactive behavior needs to be replaced with proactive behavior and these Three Missing Pieces implemented.

Lets get real for a minute. Something needs to change. Results need to improve. You can not change results doing the same old things.

To get started on company transformation into a cash generating machine, it doesn’t matter why results are now what they are. Because, all transformations start at the same place.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR MIND!

Transformation requires change, change requires action, action requires a choice, choices are based on mind set, mind set is the lens through which you decide to view the world.

Positive transformation can not take place with a faulty world view.

A flat world view kept thousands of explorers from venturing over the seas in search of gold at the end of the rainbow. Until Columbus decided to have a round world view, then a new world was discovered and … well you know the rest of this story.

Many CEOs, business owners and business leaders have a flat world view. Their paradigm only goes as far as they can easily see. It is limited to things they know well and/ or are comfortable with. Frankly most business success comes from providence, being at the right place at the right time. This kind of success is not sustainable, changes in the marketplace occur and the company finds themselves continually reacting to these outside circumstances. Then they find there are internal constraints that this reactive state keeps bumping into.

The solution is to have a round world view. Think the real world is not limited to what you can easily see or what you know or what is currently chomping at your feet.

Transformation starts from the mind up. Change to a round world view. Most disruptive ideas come from outside an industry. Someone puts a new spin on satisfying a market need based on a round world view. Truth is not limited to what I see, know or have experience with.

Another mind set a successful CEO needs is to change how you see yourself. Many if not most CEO/ founders have a vision, have some early success then find their results slipping and themselves putting in more and more and more time trying to stick their fingers in the holes springing up in the dike.

As a CEO you need to change your mind about who you are. At your very core you need to have a “Founders” mind set; not an employee or boss or Hero mind set. Here is the difference:

Many companies are started based on a good idea to satisfy a market need or a skill or knowledge base the owner has. The new owner handles every detail and reacts to issues and problems that arise because they are Heros, knowledgeable about the issue and empowered to make a quick decision to solve it. That works at first to solve the issue…. but…. The solution can be worse than the issue if processes are bypassed and the solution is not repeatable or scalable. Heros, bosses and employees react to problems and create quick fixes, but often the fix is like how I fix home reapir issues, using wire and duct tape. They are not long term fixes.

The CEO with a Founders mind set see that they are building an organization that can go on without them. This requires effective, efficient, repeatable and scalable processes, organization, and procedures in the hands of great people who are actually smarter and more informed than the Founder and are empowered to be creative and solution finders within a continuous improvement process.

The winning Founders mind set – they see a future with themselves as expendable, not indispensable. They lead an inspired group of leaders who are empowered to make changes quickly in advance of market changes not reacting to market changes.

I was sitting at a local restaurant trying to read a book in preparation for a meeting and a guy at the next table kept talking to me. He was an old guy talking about this watch he found and trying to return it to get a few dollars, which he obviously needed, then went on to his Dad etc etc. He really didn’t care if I was paying full attention but I couldn’t help hearing him out of the corner of my attention.

Then out of the clear blue he said, “If your books don’t balance, you can’t blame it on anyone else!”

All of a sudden all my attention went to that statement. I’m not sure why, but it seemed so out of place and as I considered the statement, I realized how profound it was.

“If your books don’t balance you can’t blame it on anyone else!”

Of course this is true at face value, but as I meditated on the wisdom of this simple principle, I realized it can apply to a lot of areas of our lives.

How often do I blame circumstances, how others have treated me, or just plain bad luck when things are not going my way; instead of taking personal responsibility for choices and decisions that I have made that put me in the situation? A lot!

I am going to purpose to live more by this principle of personal responsibility so that I can take control over my circumstances, make better choices and actually have a positive effect on the future.

At the risk of every other post on this blog being completely downhill, here is the BEST tidbit of advice I can think of. This is not some feel good psycho blabber, but rather good old meat and potatoes practical advice you can implement immediately!

Where there is UNITY God commands a blessing!

That’s it?

Yep!

First of all it sounds simplistic. That is because it is! If it were too complicated we’d never get it:-) It is a core principle stated in many ways throughout the whole bible. Unity is the basis of God himself as the Trinity. He says others will know Jesus is truly sent by God by our unity. He calls the church to oneness and unity. Families to unity. Men to unity with one another. So it is simple because it is a foundational principle.

And it works in business, family, friendships, church and on and on.

Plus, it is something we can choose. We choose how to take comments and discussions and what motives we ascribe to others.

This week at work I saw several instances of conflict between co- workers. Usually caused by poor communication and the poor communications were cause by people not trusting each other’s motives so taking offense when none was intended. Then conflict occurred that involved more people picking up offense for the original parties, and on and on.

But when all parties are pulling in unity – amazing things start to happen and the fruit is BLESSINGS.

So today- try this little test. Choose to ascribe good motives to everyone you come into contact with and see the results.

Join the crowd. The economic recession has put many well run and successful companies on the verge of closing their doors. Layoffs are the norm. Summer jobs for young people are almost non existent. Slashing payrolls have left many homeowners trying to figure out how to keep their homes. Consumer confidence continues to slide and the cycle continues to worsen.

There is hope! There are proven principles to follow in order to stop the slide and in fact be an early turn around success.

I have been involved in several successful turnarounds and will begin a series about these principles and share specific things you can do to survive through hard times.

The first principle is “Cash In“.

Cash In means that every person in the organization must focus on bringing cash into the company. SHOW ME THE MONEY! This must become a primary focus. It starts at the top and must permeate through to the lowest levels of the company. I can not repeat this mantra enough!!!! CASH IN- SHOW ME THE MONEY.

Everything the company does must be rebuilt to make this CASH IN a key metric for survival and turnaround success.

Here are some specific steps and tactics:

1. Build a business model that shows the cash generated or used each month. A business model is NOT a business plan and it is NOT a budget and it is NOT a simple spreadsheet of income and expenses. Without a true business model, you will likely fail!

So what do I mean by a business model? I mean a model you build that recognizes the key Metrics (success factors) of your business and their interrelatedness. If you sell more of X what else changes? When does the cash come in and when does it go out? Are you selling more and enjoying it less because your accounts receivables are growing? The business model should have a page of assumptions that are all in one place so it is easy to do “What If Analysis”. If you change any assumption how does my cash change? The model needs to be built at the detail level so that it provides each month a projected amount for each item on your general ledger. The model needs to be built at a foundational level that shows your UNIT ECONOMICS. Businesses are built on units. A unit may be a location for a franchise; or a publication for a publisher; or a crew for a remodeler; or a product for a manufacturer. Determine how to make each unit function better, faster, cheaper and then replicate the units. But you can not use up cash on a unit and make it up on the volume!

You will want to compare your actual results with the model each month and take the time for a continuous improvement process on the model. How did the model compare to actual results and how does it need to change to do a better job of projecting results? This is a never ending process.

But it yields some amazing results- You sleep better at night; you will understand your business better every month; you will find yourself creating new strategies that improve your Cash In; your outside parties of interest (BOD, investors, banks) will have more confidence in the business; you will deserve the confidence.

What are the benefits of a true business model? A business model lets you brainstorm creative strategies to improve your business. The end point of the new strategy run through the business model is simply, “did I get more Cash IN”? The model lets you target a unit and figure how to make the unit run more efficiently, and bring more CASH IN; then you can develop strategies to expand into more units.

Unless you are running a very simple one product, one person home business, no one can keep all the interrelationships in mind without a business model. I have seen many times where a trusted professional advisor gives reasonable advice, except it is WRONG!

Rather than go into more steps and tactic to bring more Cash In, let me share to an important Turnaround Secret:

You can not survive by cutting costs alone! Cost cutting always lags the economic realities your company faces. The slide and slope is always faster than you can react to… and if you try to react too fast without a business model, you will makes killer mistakes. Negativity is like a shot in the head to a company.

The ultimate Cash IN machine is knowing your business model and interactions between key metrics; understanding your unit economics and fine tuning them; and then…

Developing creative strategies to do more business. The survival and success answer is always about how to do more business that brings Cash IN.

Don’t get me wrong, cutting fat and renegotiating lower costs is very important. I look at every line item and religiously hack away at the cost of our business- but not at the expense of the business model and our unit economics. We have renegotiated and bid out every cost from our phone and internet and other connectivity costs all the way down to the cost of our landscape service. You can get some great deals by companies hungry to generate Cash IN. But cutting 10 or 20 or even 30 or more percent of these costs can not make up for a significant slide in sales.

But here is the good news. All this work to reduce the monthly overhead and improve the unit economics and gain better control and understanding of the business creates a CASH IN MACHINEthat will become very profitable when the consumer confidence does come back!!! Your business can be one of the remaining survivors that will increase market share and prosper in the days ahead.

Check back for more principles and specific strategies and ideas that are proven winners in the CASH IN sweepstakes…..

I have been on LinkedIn for several years and have recognized its a beneficial place to build a professional network of contacts.

Unfortunately, I never put much effort into building my connections.

I procrastinated.

Recently, I decided to put some effort into building professional connections and begin doing a better job of managing my lifelong network of friends and business associates.

In the midst of that process, I came across this nice easy to read e book written by Jonathan Milligan, an executive recruiter from Florida. I could give you a summary, or share some of the ideas, but decided the best way for you to respond is to go to Jonathan’s blog and request your own free copy.

Welcome

Everyone wants to succeed in life. Our definitions of success may vary, but some common themes pass among all of us. Love, family, peace, prosperity, health, eternal security, faith... Lets discover together the principles and choices we can use to succeed in life!